What are the benefits of cloud migration for the businesses ?

Improves scalability, Delivers greater agility, Ensures more flexibility, Reduces cost, Improves operational performance, Reduces CAPEX, Enhances security and compliance, Brings in less maintenance, Facilitates built-in status monitoring

cloud migration

9 Important Steps for Cloud Migration

sitemanager — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 15:37:19 +0000

Businesses continue to invest heavily in the IT infrastructure and additionally the licenses are required for both software and hardware which essentially involves cost and time. As businesses revolve around ways to reduce their costs and ease their operations, it is at this particular point, the concept of cloud migration comes into place. Cloud migration is the process of moving databases, applications, and IT processes of businesses into the cloud.

Content1. An overview of cloud migration statistics by leading research analysts 2. Major Benefits of Cloud Migration for Businesses 3. Top considerations businesses must know before adopting Cloud Migration 4. 9 Important steps for Cloud Migration 5. How can TestingXperts help with Cloud Migration?

This cloud migration or cloud computing effectuates the move from on-premise or legacy infrastructure to the cloud. This legacy infrastructure includes servers, networking equipment, apps, databases, and other software or hardware infrastructure which can be moved to the cloud through the process of cloud migration.

There are many benefits businesses get with cloud migrations such as agility, flexibility, cost-effectiveness, improved CX, etc. With many leading cloud service providers, businesses can get services on-demand and can pay only for the resources they use. Thus, more and more businesses are moving towards the cloud. There are interesting facts and some statistics stated by leading research analysts on cloud migration.

An overview of cloud migration statistics by leading research analysts

● Forrester predicts that the global public cloud infrastructure market will grow 35% to $120 billion in 2021. Alibaba cloud will take the Third revenue spot globally, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

● According to Forbes, 32% of IT budgets will be dedicated to the cloud by 2021.

● A recent survey conducted by Flexera on 750 enterprises and small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), in the first quarter of 2020 revealed that the vast majority of respondents (93 percent) have already employed a multi-cloud strategy.

● According to Enterprise Cloud Solutions, half of the U.S State and Federal governments heavily use the cloud. On a similar note, another FedRAMP Survey Results Report states that the governments in the United States, especially in bigger cities, are increasing their cloud adoption especially following the initial COVID-19 outbreak.

● As per the news published by The Hindu, Tech giant Microsoft has witnessed an over 775% increase in demand for cloud services post-pandemic. The COVID-19 outbreak across the world led companies to shift from on-premise IT infrastructures to the cloud

All these above data signifies how important it is for businesses to look upon cloud migrations. It is also predicted that multi-cloud will dominate post-pandemic and COVID-19 has been a major driving force for the accelerated demand of hybrid and multi-cloud models for businesses. Moreover, with the huge number of benefits of the cloud, businesses are moving towards cloud adoptions rapidly.

Major Benefits of Cloud Migration for Businesses

1. Improves scalability

Cloud computing helps in scaling up the business by supporting large workloads. Unlike on-premise infrastructure, it does not require any physical setup of assets like servers, networking equipment, software licenses, etc.

2. Delivers greater agility

Cloud delivers greater agility with IT resources and helps businesses to scale during surges or seasonal sales with loads of users accessing the resources.

3. Ensures more flexibility

Cloud computing enables businesses to add or take away resources as and when needed. Businesses can quickly expand or decrease computer processing, memory, storage, etc. to meet the ever-changing needs of their customers and business needs. Also, employees and customers can access cloud services from anywhere and anytime.

4. Reduces cost

In cloud computing, businesses can pay only for the resources used. Also in cloud computing, everything is handled by the cloud provider such as upgrades, maintenance, etc., and thus reduces overall costs to businesses.

5. Improves operational performance

Cloud computing helps businesses to increase performance and delivers improved user experience. With the help of apps and websites hosted on the cloud, data is readily available to customers which reduces latency and improves performance.

6. Reduces CAPEX

Cloud computing helps businesses to shift from Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) by shifting from an operating expenses model to a pay-as-you-go model which is beneficial for businesses.

7. Enhances security and compliance

Cloud providers keep in check of all security and compliance policies to ensure that sensitive data is safe on the cloud. Cloud providers take care of all policies and thus businesses need not worry about data leaks or loss while adopting cloud migration. They also ensure automatic security updates to their systems protect them from vulnerabilities.

8. Brings in less maintenance

Unlike traditional IT systems that need employees to spend the entire day on tedious maintenance of costly equipment, the public cloud does not need much human support for maintenance. This frees up employees to focus on more important tasks which ultimately helps in driving greater outcomes for businesses.

9. Facilitates built-in status monitoring

Many of the cloud providers ensure and provide monitoring of apps or machines and immediately notify businesses of any outage or downtime. More importantly, cloud service providers subsequently perform disaster recovery with automatic backup and logging of the key metrics to provide information on what caused the issue.

Top considerations businesses must know before adopting Cloud Migration

Migrating to the cloud is an important aspect for businesses, and even before migrating to the cloud, businesses across domains and industries should try to understand the below points:

● Take a stance on the cloud infrastructure stack flexibility before opting for cloud migration

● Identify cross-application dependencies before planning the migration waves and plan to migrate all dependent systems together

● Identify logical sequencing of migration waves. For example, if accessing some internal applications which require a VPN system to be set up, your VPN server needs to be migrated before the internal applications

● Have an understanding of the probable workloads that can be moved and which cannot be moved to the cloud

● Analyze or get an understanding of the security and safety of authentication and authorization that will be given by the cloud provider

● Get a clear understanding of the customer access to your services and the extent of availability from the cloud provider during migration along with disaster recovery processes

● Get an understanding of databases as they are usually encrypted, hence consider encryption and decryption aspects while moving to the cloud

● Get an understanding of the security and compliance challenges that might crop up during the migration

● Take up a cost estimate for cloud migration and analyze the ROI to decide upon cloud migration

After analyzing the above points, then businesses can move their data, apps, databases, etc. to the cloud by following an effective cloud migration process.

9 Important steps for Cloud Migration

1. Perform an organizational assessment :

It is necessary to first assess the organizational need and business objectives that are to be achieved through cloud adoption.

2. Assess current infrastructure readiness and requirements:

Assess the current state of your business infrastructure. Determine whether your business is ready to be moved to the cloud. Shifting to cloud solutions might require reconfiguring the entire business to fit as per the technology. Therefore, first assess the current requirements and readiness of your business infrastructure to safely move to the cloud.

3. Choose between cloud deployment models:

Select the right platform wherein you need to decide whether you want to migrate your IT infrastructure to the private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud. Public cloud is scalable, cost-effective due to pay per usage model. Private cloud is good for businesses that require the highest level of data security. Hybrid cloud allows the movement of workloads between private and public clouds through orchestration. Multi-cloud allows businesses to reap the benefits of each cloud platform. Hence, based on the benefit with each of these, you can decide between single cloud, multi-cloud, etc.

4. Determine the service model of cloud computing:

There are three main service models of cloud computing – Infrastructure as Services (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Services (PaaS). All these three service models have varied features for storage and resource pooling, and thus, as a business, you have to decide which one you should adopt based on the business need.

5. Define cloud KPIs:

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the metrics that help to measure the performance of your application and services against your expectations. Some of these cloud migration KPIs are; User experience –page load time, response time; infrastructure – CPU usage %, disk performance, memory; Application performance – error rates, throughput, Availability, etc. As a business, you should have the KPIs made available and analyze them for your cloud migration.

6. Define the cloud roadmap:

Before heading towards the cloud migration and actual execution process, it is essential to first prepare a detailed cloud migration roadmap. The roadmap should outline the data migration process step-by-step and how long it is expected to complete the cloud migration process.

7. Choose the right apps to move to the cloud:

Decide whether you want to migrate all apps at once or to opt for service-by-service. Not all apps are cloud-friendly, while some apps work well on the private cloud, and some apps work well on the public cloud. Therefore, you need to carefully choose the right apps that should be moved to the cloud.

8. Migrate your data:

Now comes the most important step i.e. migration of apps and data. It is easier to migrate slowly and in small manageable steps. This sort of effective migration helps you to understand what is working and what needs to be changed during the cloud migration process.

9. Test thoroughly and then move to production:

Once your cloud environment is all set, data is populated, and when apps are moved to the cloud, it is time to conduct an end-to-end cloud testing of apps and data. The more complicated your architecture is, the more caution is required and more thorough end-to-end cloud testing is needed to ensure successful cloud migration.

How can TestingXperts help with Cloud Migration?

Cloud-based platforms have helped enterprises to reduce time-to-market and eliminate upfront costs. Due to this cloud-based solutions are in high demand. But some issues related to data security, privacy, integration, and application performance pose a great challenge to successful application migration to the cloud. Businesses require cloud-based testing to ensure successful cloud implementation and to realize the complete benefits from cloud solutions.

TestingXperts (Tx) helps you define an effective strategy to test the cloud so that you can address all the challenges and pitfalls. Software testing in the cloud usually focuses on functional testing of the application, and it also needs a strong emphasis on non-functional and cloud-specific testing. Tx adopts this end-to-end approach to ensure high quality across all aspects of cloud implementation. We have experience in testing leading SaaS products and understand the associated complexities. We bring specific domain expertise in various industry verticals along with proven experience in other non-functional cloud testing services.

The post 9 Important Steps for Cloud Migration first appeared on TestingXperts.

What are Cloud Migration Tips CIOs Must Consider?

developer — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 14:26:18 +0000

Contents 1. Need for Cloud Migration 2. When to move your workloads and applications to the cloud? 3. Cloud Migration Tips to Follow 4. What are the best Cloud Migration tools? 4. Conclusion

Enterprises and organizations of all sizes continue to consider and move towards the cloud to gain complete advantage of it. Organizations considering to move towards cloud migration seek to gain quick access to all new services, toolsets, and platforms that are all integrated into cloud. Typically, cloud migration is defined as a process that involves moving data, applications and other business elements to a cloud computing environment. Whether your organization is looking out for one/multiple workloads, an entire portfolio, you must understand the intricacies of cloud migration. Therefore, enterprises should plan effectively to take complete benefits while migrating to cloud leveraging cloud testing.

Need for Cloud Migration

There are many benefits enterprises get with cloud migration such as flexibility to balance growing bandwidths, achieve effective disaster recovery and the great flexibility to work from anywhere, anytime. Extra CAPEX is reduced and it ensures increased collaboration of resources along with provision for document control. Moreover, there is a piece of upcoming good news that cloud providers are increasing the number of tools available to protect your data. Thus, enterprises can take the full advantage of cloud testing to plan and achieve successful cloud migrations for which CIOs should take a stance and know when they should move towards the cloud.

When to move your workloads and applications to the cloud?

– Whenever your applications continue to experience huge traffic and it essentially becomes difficult to scale up your existing resources

– If you are a SaaS provider and your clients demand faster application development and deployment, then you can opt for cloud while you can effectively cut down on infrastructure overheads

– Whenever you are in a need to expand your business and diversify geographically or think to accommodate a multi-region infrastructure system

– In situations where you want to reduce your operational costs and increase the effectiveness of your IT systems

Therefore, enterprises CIOs have to make intelligent decisions while moving their workloads to Cloud and should carefully plan their cloud migration strategy to realize complete benefits out of migration. It is also essential for CIOs to evaluate whether their applications will work efficiently in the cloud environment and how best they can take benefit. According to Forbes, 83% of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2020. Gartner forecasts that worldwide public cloud revenue to grow exponentially through 2022. They also state that currently almost 19 percent of cloud budgets are spent on cloud-related services such as cloud consulting, implementation, migration and managed services, and expects that this rate will increase to 28 percent by 2022.

But, in order to achieve successful and effective cloud migrations, the following tips should be carefully considered and followed by enterprises CIOs. These tips help to achieve the best cloud migrations and ultimately deliver the benefits to your enterprise.

Cloud Migration Tips to Follow

1. Analyze your App to Determine Cloud Type:

Enterprises CIOs need to perform a deep analysis of the application to know whether the application will be able to support and work effectively in a virtualized environment. They should carefully analyze if app would work well on PaaS (Platform as a Service) or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). They should also take a view on how exactly moving and running it on cloud impacts their business.

2. Plan Cloud Migrations Carefully (Hybrid/Public Cloud):

Primarily decide whether all your applications and data should be moved to public cloud such that nothing remains on-premise. Some business or regulatory environments may demand that applications be hosted on private cloud or a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Hence, without a proper plan or cloud strategy, enterprises CIOs cannot take the complete advantage of cloud.

3. Evaluate in Detail Cloud Economics:

Enterprises CIOs should have an understanding of cloud adoption economics and should be able to develop an effective business case. This business case should deliver a clear understanding of Capital Expenses (CAPEX) and Operational Expenses (OPEX), which highlights the economics of the pay-as-you-go model. Especially for start-ups or for small businesses, a pay-as-you-go model of cloud migration works well as no CAPEX is spent on hardware, data center space, supporting software and they pay only for what they use. While for other enterprises who have already invested in hardware and data centers, it is essential to evaluate the detailed cost factor involved and then decide upon cloud migrations.

4. Perform Security, Compliance & Governance Assessments:

All security aspects of the apps should be carefully planned and included in the cloud migration process. An effective and continuous compliance should also be set up by looking at the environment to control consumption and usage of services in the cloud. This process essentially requires implementation of software standards that check specific governance and compliance requirements and thus helps to ensure effective cloud migration.

5. Pilot Test Cloud to Move in Phases:

It is essential for enterprises to protect themselves against disruptions during migrations. Therefore, the IT team should initially devise ways to try the application in cloud even before fully switching over to the new cloud environment. Thus, it is advised to perform a pilot cloud migration to measure its success and understand how best the application supports it and then upon success, plan to move in phases towards cloud.

6. Embrace Automation:

Automation is the core tenet of cloud implementation for which infrastructure as code is the basic feature. The goal of cloud adoption is to have automation at its core and this is achieved with each application being implemented and deployed through code (including the creation of infrastructure). Moreover, automating most of what is required to migrate applications to the cloud helps to lower unit costs of workloads. Thus, automation also reduces migration time to perfectly fit into the more stringent migration time windows.

What are the best Cloud Migration tools?

VMware/CloudHealth Technologies:

The VMware offers several cloud services for migration, infrastructure design, cybersecurity, and frontline support. This is a trusted cloud management platform for many enterprises because it helps to analyse and manage the security, usage, cloud cost, etc. Google Migration Services (Velostrata): The recent innovation from Google is the Velostrata that can effectively help to improve the capabilities of cloud migration. This tool helps to perform migrations that are 10x faster. Similar to the other cloud vendor services, the Google migration services are free but have the condition for supporting Google Cloud only.

Turbonomic:

Compared to other services and tools that focus on cloud migration, this tool is effective for a hybrid cloud automation platform. This tool monitors, optimizes, and manages the workloads even after the completion of the migration. This tool is an effective option for DevOps teams that are using Azure and AWS.

Azure Migration Tools:

This tool is a benefit for the customers who are preferring to migrate their workloads to Azure. This tool is a product from Microsoft offering comprehensive service, database migration service, and data box hardware for offline data transfer. Similar to other cloud vendors, this tool is effective for hybrid cloud environments that are running on Microsoft and Windows software.

Cloud Endure:

This tool helps to automate the shift and lift cloud migrations. This tool is efficient in replicating the source machines to staging areas. This tool is one of the easiest and least time-consuming in the AWS migration process.

Micro Focus PlateSpin Migration Factory:

This tool is a data venter transformation platform that reduces errors and accelerates server migrations in a high degree of automation. This tool helps in the creation of cohesive plans where migrations can be utilized and executed in integration testing. This tool further benefits in many ways such as integrating testing in every server migration job; to plan, test, automate assessment and migration in data centres.

AWS Migration Services:

This tool is developed by Amazon and it is widely known in the cloud market. This tool offers several cloud migration services such as the AWS Server Migration Service, AWS Database Migration Service, Snow Family of offline data transfer appliances, and AWS Migration Hub. The services provided by this tool are almost free for an AWS customer; however, the tools support only for AWS.

Dynatrace:

This is another tool from AWS partner with AI-powered analytics that allows to introduce a greater level of automation in AWS infrastructure. This robust tool helps to monitor cloud infrastructure, analyse the performance of the application, to identify and resolve issues related to user experience across devices.

Conclusion

As enterprise CIOs plan to move their applications and data into the cloud, there are certain factors to be considered and analyzed before they actually move towards it. In order to have a successful cloud migration, CIOs should plan migration at scale as it refers to the technology, processes, and people who move application workloads to the cloud. At times, cloud migration also brings about some unique challenges related to data security, privacy, integration and application performance. Specifically, these challenges require comprehensive cloud-based testing to ensure that your cloud migrations and implementations are successful and that you realize complete benefits out of it. Leverage next-gen specialist QA service providers effective cloud testing services to get the complete advantage of your cloud migrations and implementations.

The post What are Cloud Migration Tips CIOs Must Consider? first appeared on TestingXperts.

QA Testing Checklists for Successful Cloud Migration

admin — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 14:50:37 +0000

The key business drivers behind moving workloads to the cloud vary from one organization to another. It might be an intention to improve scalability and performance or simply to reduce the organization’s upfront investment by assigning their IT infrastructure responsibilities to one of the trusted service providers, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon (AWS), IBM, Google or Oracle. Forbes explains some of the many reasons or business drivers for organizations moving to the cloud in this article

Contents 1. QA Focus Areas for Successful Cloud Migration 2. Conventional Testing Vs Cloud Testing 3. Addressing Key Challenges That Arise While Validating Applications 4. Functional Validation 6. Integration Testing (With Third-Party Applications) 7. Security Testing 8. Performance Testing 9. How TestingXperts Can Help You

Once you have decided to move your products or services to the cloud, testing is a crucial step in the cloud migration journey. It avoids cloud scalability issues, server breakdown issues such as application/website crash, database errors and more, which can be extremely risky in terms of brand’s reputation, time and resources.

With that in mind, business owners or IT decision makers should properly plan and perform their cloud migration journey while putting cloud Testing in top priority during cloud migration irrespective of environment.

QA Focus Areas for Successful Cloud Migration

Cloud migration requires key focus on certain areas of Application (product/service) Testing, such as: Functional Validation, Integration Testing, Security Testing, Scalability and Performance Testing.

However, cloud hosting adds new dimensions to application validation when it is compared to conventional testing. The table below depicts QA focus areas of application testing migrated to cloud, compared to conventional testing:

Conventional Testing Vs Cloud Testing

Addressing Key Challenges That Arise While Validating Applications

Cloud migration throws certain challenges in validating applications. Some of the instances and how to validate them at various aspects are discussed here.

Functional Validation

Functional validation or cloud-ready validation assesses production readiness of migrated applications. It is fundamental to verify if various aspects of the migrated applications are performing as per SLAs. For an effective cloud migration, validate SaaS/Cloud services functions and perform end-to-end application’s function validation. Check the following test cases to perform functional validation of an application for cloud testing:

Automated test suite is compatible with the application over the cloud

Whether a valid input gives the expected results

Service integration with other applications

Page layout and object references are working as expected

Cross-platform compatibility is ensured

Integration Testing (With Third-Party Applications)

Cloud migration is not just moving data, but it is managing a range of variables – security, authentication, integration, compatibility, testing and monitoring over time. Among the above variables, integration with third-party tools plays a significant role. Because, today, there are many technology choices with cloud integration than ever before. But, the dependencies between systems and applications can complicate integration testing. If you are integrating a lot of services together that come with varying SLAs, testing in the cloud with a plethora of third-party tools, services and applications, represents a major challenge. To avoid such issues, ensure you go through the below checklist and validate them effectively:

What interfaces and systems need to be covered while planning for integration testing?

What resources you need to do the validation and integration testing?

Have a plan to develop and execute tests in coordination with third-party components

Perform Integration Testing early

Detect coordination problems in cloud environment – this is to ensure the applications are well configured with cloud environment

If you don’t have in-house expertise, make sure to outsource validation for integration to your cloud provider or a managed service provider who fills the gap.

Security Testing

One of the main deterrents to migrating to the cloud is Security. Applications can be very secure in the cloud, but unlike conventional storage, you will not have any hardware. This means, you don’t have complete control over the data. To keep the data secure in the cloud requires a whole new level of security procedures and strategies. If you are planning for an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) architecture, ensure you check whether your workloads can be migrated to the cloud; or will there be any significant difficulties after migration. Following checklist can be handy to crosscheck some cases:

If you have legacy applications running on outdated platforms
Proprietary software
User validation – ensure the applications are accessible only by authorized users and are available only to them
Protective measures against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
Validation of data security at rest, in use and during transit
almost inevitably, the data is going to spread across multiple networks and devices after migration, with varying levels of risk and security. Before you can take an effective plan to avoid risk completely

here’s a checklist or questions you need to have answers:

What type of sensitive data do you use, store or transfer?

Who has access to this data?

Why, when and where the users access this data?

How is data stored when it is idle?

How data access is controlled?

What are the compliance requirements?

Various aspects of application Security Testing include: Data security and data privacy testing, application transaction security, business process security and user privacy security testing.

Performance Testing

Assessing performance and response time requirements of applications and workloads while migrating to the cloud is a significant factor determining cloud migration success.

There are areas that affect moving an application to a cloud service, some of them include response time implications and scalability factors. Check out the below steps to ensure workload performance and SLAs are met:

Identify and document business transactions and application’s end-to-end flow

Identify business SLAs for the business transactions

Examine if your software comes with limited internet bandwidth or intensive CPU and input-output capacity requirements

Address application’s architecture that is not appropriate with the cloud

Identify monitoring requirements and setup tools

Validate response times as per SLAs – perform Load Testing in parallel and validate whether applications or service performances under various loads are meeting the SLAs

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan

Be prepared for the worst-case scenarios in the cloud, from simple data recovery and disaster recovery practice to a plan addressing unique incidents of attack. Validate all your disaster recovery plans in the event of cloud outages.

Test, measure and update business continuity processes periodically

Perform tests to run simulations and evaluate team’s readiness

Consider the test results to change or update your business continuity plan over time

Validate application instances to restore automatically during hardware failures

How TestingXperts Can Help You

Moving to the cloud is a smarter way to get better and faster service at less price. And, this is only possible once all the boxes in the checklists mentioned in this article have been crossed and you follow the steps of each testing area correctly. Testing the objectives/validations and approaches that were mentioned in the above cloud assessment checklist could be quite tough. Our best bet is to work with a team that has done cloud migration testing before, many times.

TestingXperts helped hundreds of enterprises assess their cloud migration journey successfully by deploying validation checklists for each application to be migrated – avoiding problems and additional costs during IT migration.

The post QA Testing Checklists for Successful Cloud Migration first appeared on TestingXperts.